Team Fortress 2 Crashes, HL2, Server Errors, Freezes, and Fixes

Team Fortress 2 is currently the most played PC multiplayer game following its move to free to play business model. This transition hasn’t been smooth, Valve servers are over loaded, and new players are finding it difficult to get started with the game.

That said, there are also some technical difficulties faced by those, who haven’t played any source engine game before. So, if you are among these and are experiencing any of these issues, start reading the troubleshooting guide that follows.

1# Team Fortress 2 Low FPS Fix
If you have been experiencing the drop in FPS in Team Fortress 2 lately, this fix may help you resolve the issue.

Go to this location:

C:\Program Files\Steam\appcache\stats

You will find a file name called:

UserGameStats_####_#### (# = some numbers)

This file basically records different stats in Team Fortress 2 and is updated frequently while playing the game.

So, if you have any antivirus program running in the background, this file will be scanned all the time whenever it updates, which is too frequent. Resulting in low performance of Team Fortress 2 or say Drop in FPS.

In order to resolve the issue, you need to add this file/folder into the exceptions list of your antivirus/internet security program so it doesn’t scan it all the time.

Fix

Open up your Anti-virus program

Go to the settings menu

Select Exceptions/Exclusions

Add the following folder to the scan exceptions

C:\Program Files\Steam\appcache\stats

Restart and enjoy the smooth gameplay. If you don’t know how to add this file into exceptions list of your antivirus, check the following images for the corresponding security programs.

This may also increase other Steam games performance. Thanks ChrisCTX for the Fix.

2# Team Fortress 2 Replay Editor Crashes

3# Can’t Launch TF2 Validating Steam Files Stuck
Go to the \team fortress 2\tf folder, backup your maps, screenshots, and everything else. Delete the \team fortress 2\ folder or you can back it up somewhere else and copy the maps back later. Now, once you have done all that, try to launch the game.

4# Team Fortress 2 Map Error
If you are getting a crash or an error while trying to load any specific map in TF2, then go to your Team Fortress 2 maps folder and delete that specific map.

Next time when you fire TF2, it will download that map and hopefully connect successfully. In order to download the map, you will need to connect to a server with that map playing, it will automatically download that map.

5# Server Browser Can’t See Any TF2 Servers
Team Fortress 2 servers are currently listed under Team Fortress so when you filter to see Team Fortress 2 servers only, you will get nothing.

6# How to Startup Team Fortress 2 with Launch Options

7# HL2.exe Crashes
Refer to #9 and you will find several workarounds to fix this issue.

8# TF2 Crashes
If you are experiencing random crashes when playing the game, you may need to get rid of your old data and redownload it from Steam.

Delete the TF2 folder, and redownload all the maps and mods you have from the Steam. Don’t forget to make a back up in case you mess it up.

9# HL2.exe and Team Fortress 2 Crashes
It seems most of the people with Windows 7 64bit version are experiencing random crashes with hl2.exe of TF2. It starts with a looping sound freeze followed by a crash. It may also happen after exporting or creating a video in replay. May happen when you exit the server.

So they are two things you can do to avoid the frustration that results after these crashes. You can run the game in windowed mode or you can disable the Windows Aero Themes. The latter may work for few but the first workaround will work for most.

Though, you may not like playing this game in Windowed but if you can’t fix the crash, you should give it a try. Multitasking beats everything.

Type this into your startup options:

-windowed -noborder

This will give you a fake full screen, a window without borders, so it isn’t all that bad.

If your game window is too small, you can just change the resolution in-game, or type this into the start up options:

-w #### -h ####

Replace #### with your resolution. W stands for Width and H for Height. For example, on a 1680×1050 resolution it would look like that:

-windowed -noborder -w 1680 -h 1050

Hopefully it will fix most of these issues.

OR Disable the in-game Steam Community, which can you do by going to Steam library > Right click TF2 > Properties > Un-check “Enable Steam community In-Game” > Close.

OR if you still aren’t satisfied, you can set your anti-aliasing and filtering settings as recommended or below. This has worked for many and if you are lucky, will work for you.

OR If you have any custom HUD installed, remove it, and restart the game. It has fixed this issue for many.

OR you can set ‘mat_antialias 0’ in your config file of Team Fortress 2, which can be found here:

It can be several hundred other reasons causing these crashes, if you face these crashes, let me know, and we can both try to dissect the problem.

10# Team Fortress 2 Random Freezes

11# Team Fortress 2 Corrupted Graphics

12# Team Fortress 2 Tweaks, Max FPS ConfigsComing Soon.

13# Can’t Connect to Item Servers
Logout and Restart Steam.

14# Entering the Server, TF2 Crashes with This ErrorFailed to lock index buffer in CMeshDX8::LockIndexBuffer

Exit Steam.

Go to your Steam folder and delete ‘ClientRegistry.blob’.

Go to your Steam\steamapps\USERNAME folder and delete the team fortress 2 folder.

Start Steam.

Verify the integrity of TF2’s cache.

Launch TF2.

15# Performance Boost For High End Machines
If you are running the game on high end machines like Quadcore, you may want to configure the game to use the system resources well. It depends on how many threads your machine can handle. Try following tweak:

Right click on Team Fortress 2 in the games library

Properties

Launch options

add this line -threads 4

Set it to how many threads your processor. You can check it by opening up the task manager. You can also achieve the same by adding mat_queue_mode 2 in your autoexec file.

It’s just a config file that gives the launch parameters to your game everytime you start. You can find it here:

\team fortress 2\tf\cfg\

Or if you don’t have this file, create a text document, add this line mat_queue_mode 2 in it, and save it with .cfg extension. Finally, put it in the folder specified above.

16# Steam VAC TF2 Server Connection Failure
If you are getting kicked from server, or can’t connect to a server after getting kicked, try the following workarounds.

17# Server Has Lost Connection to Steam
Team Fortress 2 servers are overloaded when the game went Free to Play so keep your patience, Valve will upgrade it’s infrastructure to compensate the numbers.

18# Can’t Launch TF2 With Steam in Online
Valve have confirmed this issue and will address it in the next patch.

19# TF2 Controls Don’t Work

20# TF2 Doesn’t Start

Verify the game cache.

Update your game to the most current version

Right-click on the game and select “Properties”

Click on the “Local Files” tab

Click on the “Verify Integrity of Game Cache” button

If that doesn’t work, launch TF2 with the autoconfig parameter.

Update your game to the most current version

Right-click on the game and select “Properties”

Click on the “General” tab

Click on the “Set Launch Options…” button

Add “-autoconfig” to the launch options and click OK

Restart your game.

If the game successfully starts, you should remove -autoconfig from your launch options.

If you still can’t start the game, try:

Close Steam

Navigate to the C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\[username] folder (if you installed steam in a different location, this path will be different)